


When I Become Like Static

by lalalive



Category: Merlin (TV)
Genre: Feels, Grief/Mourning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-05
Updated: 2013-01-05
Packaged: 2017-11-23 17:28:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 616
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/624713
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lalalive/pseuds/lalalive
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Merlin waits for Arthur and reflects on what his life has become.</p>
            </blockquote>





	When I Become Like Static

He doesn't say his name for a long while after it's happened. Just thinking it tastes like blood and he's positive he can't bare the pain of hearing it echo off the walls. Truthfully, he hardly speaks at all anymore because there's no one left to listen. The opinions of those around him seem to matter a little less now that he's gone. 

Sometimes he conjures writing on the wall in Arthur's script, pretends he's getting letters from behind the veil and it makes him smile before he remembers the trick, realizes that he never could quite forge the carefree ugliness of his hand. Those are the days when he looks at the moon and nods slowly, because there was always something oddly comforting about the dark and the moon reminds him of all the times they survived the night. 

He's stopped counting the years that pass, and, instead, he counts the breaths he takes before he finds himself someplace new. Internal time pieces are easier to measure than the endless expanse of rotations around the sun towards an unclear perhaps. He always thought himself as patient, but when his age had the potential for triple digits and he could no longer a imagine a satisfying version of the life he wanted to lead, that's when he gave up on any future beyond the certainty of the changing seasons. 

There are days when it rains and he thinks the world is mourning too, so he does nothing because at least he has some company.

There are days when the sun is shining and he wishes it would just stop, because then everything would end and at least he could say he waited like he was supposed to. 

Most days, he curls on his side, in fields or hillsides, and tries to remember the last time he truly felt happy. Because in the haze of memories that were starting to blur together, he realizes that their last few years together weren't anything remotely joyful they were simply a bearable alternative. His mind takes him back to the start, to before Mordred and Morgana, the wedding, before Uther died and realizes that the days he struggled the most to hide were littered the only times he found that everyone, all of his friends, smiled without strain.

On the days that he sits, still and motionless in front of the rolling shore of a sea he doesn't bother to name, he tries to think about the future, because that's the only hope he clings to. He pictures Arthur rising out of the water, dripping wet and confusion painted across his face because he _'should be dead'_ and _'what did you do now, Merlin?'_ A laugh has escaped him on more than one occasion when he thinks of this, because he knows this is how it would happen, should happen, and it's the only way he feels pieces of himself start to rebuild. 

He waits for Arthur while he waits for the day he doesn't call himself despondent or broken, the day he can simply say he's numb. He knows that there are days when putting yourself back together becomes easy and there days when finding the fragments that fit is too exhausting to even consider. He accepts that there are days when there isn't anything, anymore, and he likes that, in a present so filled with nothing, one day it will be filled with a most magnificent something. 

And maybe when that day comes, when ocean spray doesn't remind him of what could be and the changing of the leaves doesn't remind him of all the ways a person can die, he will find the strength to start again.


End file.
